Many devices, such as mobile telephones, personal computers (PCs), handheld computers, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), enable communications using more than one communication method. A single device may enable a user to communicate by email, by telephone, by instant messaging (IM), and by text messaging (also called short messaging service or SMS), or any combination thereof. For example, a mobile telephone will often allow a user to communicate by email, IM, and SMS, in addition to communicating by telephone. Additionally, a PC will often allow a user to communicate by email, by IM, and by telephone (using voice over internet protocol (VOIP)).
Having the ability to communicate using any one of several different communication methods is very useful and efficient, however it can present some difficulties as the different communication methods do not always integrate seamlessly. A user may receive a communication via one method but may wish to reply to the sender using a different method. For example, a user may receive an email message on the user's mobile telephone, but the user may wish to reply to the sender by telephone because the user needs to communicate in real-time with the sender due to an urgent situation. In such a situation, a user would typically need to close the email application, open the user's contact list to determine the sender's telephone number, and then place a telephone call to the sender. If the sender is not listed in the user's contact list, but the sender included the sender's telephone number in the email message, then the user would typically need to read and remember the telephone number, close the email application, and then place a telephone call to the sender. Even when the sender is listed in the user's contact list, the contact list may not include the sender's telephone number. The user may not realize the sender's telephone number is not in the contact list until the user has opened the contact list, thus the user would have wasted time looking for something that is not in the contact list. The user might then need to open the email message again to determine the sender's telephone number, read and remember the telephone number, close the email application again, and place a telephone call to the sender. This current method can be very time consuming and inefficient. Similar difficulties exist if the user has received an email message but wants to reply to the sender using IM or SMS.
Some mobile telephones may have the capability to initiate a telephone to call, upon request by a user, to a telephone number that is present in a text message or an email message. However, in many situations the telephone number of the sender of the text message or email message will not be present in the message. Additionally, the telephone numbers of other recipients of the message are seldom present in the message. As such, this capability does not provide a reliable method of replying to a text or email message by telephone. Additionally, this capability does not allow a user to reply to a text or email message by a communication method other than telephone.
Greater difficulties are encountered if the user wants to reply not only to the sender, but also to other people who received the message, or to people mentioned in the message, using a different communication method. For example, an email message may have originated with a first person and have been sent to a second person, and this second person may have forwarded the email message to the user, with a copy (“cc”) to a third person. The original email message may have included a reference to a fourth person in the body of the message, perhaps giving the fourth person's IM screen name. The user may desire to place a telephone conference call to the first, second, third, and fourth persons who sent, forwarded, received, and were referenced in, respectively, this chain of messages. This would typically entail the user performing the steps discussed above, but the user would have to perform these steps for each of the four persons with whom the user wishes to communicate. The difficulties and inefficiencies discussed above would be greatly magnified by needing to perform the steps multiple times.
Even if the user simply desires to reply to the email message using email but wants all four people to receive copies, other difficulties are encountered. In a typical email application, if the user were to select the option to send a reply-all message, such a reply-all message would only be sent to the people in the message header of the message received by the user (in the above example that would be the second person who forwarded the message to the user and the third person who received a copy of the forwarded message). If the user desired to send the reply message to the first person (the original message sender) and the fourth person (the person referenced in the body of the original message), the user would typically have to manually add the first and fourth persons' email addresses to the header of the reply message. The first person's email message would be listed in the header of the original message and, as such, would be relatively easy for the user to obtain in order to add the first person's address to the reply message (although it would need to be manually added). The fourth person's email address would have to be located in the user's contact list and manually added to the reply message. It should be appreciated that if the user desired to send a reply-all message to a large number of people who were not in the header of the message received by the user but rather listed in headers further down the chain of messages, or even merely mentioned in the body of any of the messages in the chain, this would be extremely difficult and time consuming as many names would need to be manually located and added to the reply-all message.
As such, there is a need for a user of a communication device to be able to quickly and easily reply to any person referenced in a received email message using any communication method supported by the communication device.